0
Share on bsky
View this post on Instagram
There are moments when the world feels so upside down that your nervous system can’t make sense of it.
Reading the Epstein files has brought on a new phenomenon that feels like a kind of existential nausea, a combination of shock, horror, disbelief, anguish, and rage.
What many of us are reacting to right now is a rupture of trust in humanity, existing power structures, protection, and innocence.
If you’re struggling to understand how crimes against humanity can be this visible while accountability feels this absent, you are wide awake and not alone.
Many of us are asking some version of the same questions right now: How can this have been happening for so long in plain sight? How can there be so much evidence and so little consequence? How can people still look away, excuse, minimize, or defend what should be indefensible?
What you may be experiencing is moral injury, or the distress that arises when our deeply held values are violated by people or institutions that were supposed to protect the vulnerable and uphold basic human dignity.
When realities like the Epstein files surface, they do more than expose crimes—they shatter the illusion of safety.
For survivors, this creates a triple wound:
>> Personal betrayal (“This happened to me.”)
>> Collective betrayal (“It happened everywhere, for so long.”)
>> Moral betrayal (“Powerful people knew and chose to protect themselves.”)
Our nervous systems aren’t just reacting to the news, they are inflamed by the realization that the world did not protect the innocent—and often still doesn’t!
That sickness you feel? That’s your soul saying, This should not be normalized or dismissed.
I’m learning that numbness and despair are not opposites, they are siblings. Both arise when pain exceeds our capacity to hold it.
So the real question isn’t, How do I stop feeling this? It’s, How do I feel this without losing myself or relinquishing my ability to act?
Sensitive people don’t survive by hardening. We survive by learning how to titrate truth. We are not meant to metabolize evil all at once, by ourselves.
Staying openhearted requires sacred limits, like allowing ourselves to know the truth but not marinate in it, acknowledge reality without consuming it endlessly (guilty!), and remember that awareness does not require self-sacrifice.
Remember, empathy without boundaries becomes self-harm, and true compassion includes the self.
For survivors, grieving collective betrayal without drowning means being able to name the offenses out loud. Our silence keeps us sick. Letting anger exist without turning it inward is also part of the work, while refusing to let horror steal our capacity for joy, intimacy, or beauty.
Choosing peace does not mean denying reality. It means refusing to let violence colonize our inner world. We are not meant to carry the weight of the world alone. Our work is not to absorb the darkness, but to metabolize it slowly, honestly, and then return to what is still human.
Staying soft in a brutal world is an act of moral courage. It’s how we refuse to become what harmed us.
~
Read 2 comments and reply